The Rice Cooker — Cooking Asian Food

What’s the first thing you should buy when you want to seriously cook Asian food. Not a wok, not a cleaver. It’s a rice cooker.

Why? I know how to steam rice on a stovetop just fine. But it doesn’t go right every time. When the rest of your meal is ready and you find you’ve overcooked the rice or worse, do you really want to keep other people waiting while you try it again?

A decent home rice cooker* these days costs around $US50 and if you cook Asian food often, it’s the best fifty bucks you’ll spend for the kitchen.

I’ve had a few over the years and, yes, they can have their little idiosyncrasies. For instance, our current rice cooker doesn’t do a great job unless there are two cups of rice or more. It’s just a matter of figuring out those idiosyncrasies and consistently adapting to them.

Thankfully with the exact measurement that you use to make rice, it’s easy to adapt and adjust, say, if you rice ends up a little dry and you need to add a little extra water than the instructions say.

I know some people who claim that rice is better cooked on a stovetop, but I’ll just refer them to David Thompson’s Nahm, the best Thai restaurant in the world, where every night four industrial-sized rice steamers sit on a table just inside the kitchen doors.

If a rice cooker is good enough for David Thompson, then it’s good enough for me. But of course, being David Thompson, he soaks his jasmine rice in water and jasmine flowers to give it a more, well, jasmine flavour.

My rice steamer has other uses too. A medium-sized 10 cup steamer, it’s large enough to perform other tasks.

What else can you do with a rice cooker?

If the rice cooker has a steaming tray, you can steam eggs and get them perfectly soft- or hard-boiled — perfect every time.

You can steam dumplings and bao on the tray.

And — a little trick I learnt at a cooking course recently — you can also make sticky rice on the tray!

The best bit about using a rice cooker, is that it’s one less thing to think about when making Asian food.

Just put the rice cooker on 20 minutes before completing your cooking and let it do its magic.

And that extra rice we cook every time? See my upcoming post for a leftovers recipe that will have you deliberately cooking too much rice.

*Of course you can spend more on a top quality rice cooker such as this 15-cup Cuisinart rice cooker ($127), which is ideal for big families or big parties, but we find the $50 cooker meets our needs.

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Author

Professional travel/food editorial/commercial photographer and food and travel writer based in Asia. His photography and writing assignments has seen him visit over 70 countries. Has authored some 40 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, Footprint, Rough Guides, Thomas Cook, and AA Guides. Photography has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, National Geographic Traveller, Wanderlust, Get Lost, Travel+Leisure Asia, DestinAsian, Four Seasons Magazine, Fah Thai, Sawasdee and many more.

There are 8 comments

You had me at that beautiful fried egg (up top). 😉 It took me years to sell my folks on the idea of a rice-cooker for day-to-day usage, despite the fact that mum taught us both how to make rice on the stovetop. Glad as I am to know the latter in a pinch, the rice cooker is the way to go. All things being equal (rice type, water quantity, boil duration, etc.), the difference in taste comes about from the container used to cook the rice. Mmm, stainless steeeel …

Awesome tips and ideas on this one, Terence. Really appreciate your sentiments about rice cookers being so useful for Asian cuisine. I just recently started using it for cooking veggies, too. That’s been ultra handy.

About Grantourismo

Globetrotting professional travel writing and photography team Lara Dunston and Terence Carter see their life as one big grand tour of the globe. They're going slow, local and experiential; they’ve travelling slowly and sustainably, living like locals, and doing and learning things. Lara and Terence are on a quest to explore more authentic and enriching ways to travel and make travel more meaningful and memorable. Read more about Lara Dunston and Terence Carter.